Wednesday, August 26, 2009

“This may be my masterpiece,” are the final words uttered in Quentin Tarantino’s latest film. Tarantino’s hero, a slow-drawling Tennessee commander (played by the ever scruffier Brad Pitt), who leads a brigade of Jewish Nazi-killing mercenaries, says this as he lovingly carves a swastika into the forehead of another character. It’s no coincidence that these are the last words of the movie, or that Tarantino might wish the audience to take them as his own appraisal of this film. There’s a lot in the movie that’s self-referential, to the point where the movie is much more a cultural pastiche of cinematic techniques than anything else; certainly more so than it resembles anything that might parallel actual World War II history, let alone an Aristotelian story, with beginning, middle, and end.

And presumably, Tarantino wouldn’t have it any other way. Eli Roth, a director whom Tarantino casts as “the bear Jew,” calls the film “Kosher Porn.” What he presumably means by this is that the movie is essentially a Jewish revenge fantasy: a group of Jewish mercenaries so ruthless and deadly that they strike fear into the hearts of Nazis everywhere, bedevil Hitler, and ultimately bring an end to World War II. That may be (though one is left to ask what connection Tarantino feels to such subject matter…as no Jewish director would dare be so disparaging of “real” history). But I think the word “porn” is operative in a different way as well. Like pornography, Tarantino has structured his film as series of character set pieces only loosely connected by a thru-story, with each piece structured as a long, verbal seduction that builds to a sudden release of violence (with the last set being the kind of grandiose all-members orgy of death, the kind of group release the best porn films usually save for last). Porn, indeed.

The plot, such as it is, is essentially borrowed from a series of World War II and spy movies as wide-ranging as Guns of Naverone, The Dirty Dozen, James Bond, and every movie ever made about the French resistance (with, as Jeffery Golderg points out in The Atlantic, a bit of Springtime for Hitler for good measure). The movie opens as Colonel Hanz Landa – a renowned “Jew Hunter” – interrogates a French farmer about a neighboring Jewish family and their whereabouts. Landa is cultured, charming, and something of a connoisseur, at least when it comes to hunting Jews. Next, we get an introduction to Aldo and his band of Jewish mercenaries (including the “Jewish Bear,” who gives Hitler the schvits); Aldo is the opposite of Landa: the rough American with a Southern drawl and a penchant for scalping his victims. After this, some of our characters start to meet in various combinations, and we are introduced some new and interesting actors, including a British movie-critic-turned-spy and a German-actress-turned-traitor.

Each of these pieces really do, I think, exhibit Tarantino working at the top of his form (pun intended, as you’ll see). I’m reminded of the “Big Mac” discussion in Pulp Fiction: the kind of cultural trivia that fascinates as it builds an undercurrent of tension. That scene became a kind of signature discussion piece of film-students everywhere, and each of the scenes in Inglourious Basterds does the Big Mac discussion one better. We get the clever interrogation of the French farmer, who is cornered into a Sophie’s choice of a decision. We get the nerve-wracking interview of a Jewish woman, passing as French, by Joseph Goebbels, who wants to use her theater for a German movie premier. And we get what probably will go down as a classic scene of espionage as two Jews, a British Spy, and a German film actress leading them all on a secret mission to assassinate Hitler during this very premier, play a game of “what celebrity am I” with a group of German soldiers on leave, trying not to give themselves away. There is no doubt something archly fun in the way the game – in which the players put cards on their foreheads to indicate the hidden personage they must guess at – echoes the game of hidden identity the spies are simultaneously playing…not to mention Aldo’s penchant for marking his victim’s identities on their foreheads. Each of these scenes is individually great, even if taken together they don’t add up to anything more than the sum of their parts. (Intentionally, according to Tarantino’s interview with Charlie Rose, where Tarantino essentially explains that he doesn’t believe in morality. Which explains why his films are absent of any moral character arc. They are, in Tarantino’s own words, written as actor vehicles, not really as expressions of story.) There is no doubt that Tarantino is an actor's director, and he gets fine performances out of his entire cast.

But the real point of this film is deceptive – even if we are meant to focus on character over story, acting over arc, Tarantino’s subject here is not so much the characters of the war as it is the characters who wage a war of cultures. The real villain in the film isn’t Hitler, but Goebbels, the German minister of culture who created a “pure” German cinema that glorified the exploits of the Nazis. Goebbels is after a kind of purification of cinema, and the verbal calisthenics of the other Nazis seems to emphasize this obsession with culture. What, after all, is racial cleansing but a kind of ultimate expression of aesthetics? One wonders if Tarantino isn’t after (or fears) something quite similar, in his own fraught relationship with film form; after all, like his obsessed Germans, Jew Hunters, and Nazi killers, all roads in this movie lead to the cinema, where Tarantino seems to be saying that history can be transformed, if not escaped entirely, by virtuosos with enough courage to “break through” classical sentiments about morality.

However, without the morality, it’s rather hard to tell if Tarantino wishes his film to be a tribute to cinema, a rabble-rouser, a personal indulgence, or just another exercise in stylistic borrowing. But what he seems to be doing in the closing scenes of his movie is intentionally copying the German Nazi film style: He creates a celebratory fantasy of violent triumph that is a kind of catharsis; but so similar is Tarantino’s treatment to the Nazi’s film treatment in the film-within-a-film that Hitler’s salivation over the scenes of Germans killing American soldiers is an uncomfortable mockery of our own. To what purpose might this be done, other than mere titillation? And this scene isn’t the only highly stylized borrowing in the movie. The entire film exhibits this homage of styles, one style each for each of the main characters: the style of French cinema to match the Catherine Deneuve-like French heroine; the style of the American Western to match Aldo Raines and his band of Jewish Indians; James Bond for the British spy (“At least let me go out speaking the King’s English”). The characters speak multiple languages and Tarantino slips in and out of multiple film styles, ultimately going out with his Riefenstahl-ish triumph of the pornographic will over history. It’s fascinating, but ultimately, what’s the point? To exhibit Tarantino’s mastery of cinema? Granted, anyone who’s followed Tarantino’s work takes this as a given. To create lasting art, however, I believe one must ultimately offer more than a study of form.

Perhaps what’s most aggravating about this movie though is that while Inglourious Basterds wants to erase history in its wake, and be blissfully free of morality, it’s also trafficking in the morally-weighted subject of the Holocaust. Why this subject matter? It’s weirdly insulting – at first – or possibly insanely brilliant, in the way that sometimes the autistic or the socially inept student can hit upon some brilliant insight in their obsessed recitation of arcane detail. But if it is brilliant, one is still left to wonder why a movie like this is even needed, and why now. Americans certainly aren’t lacking for propaganda, nor does either an homage to Germanic cultural exceptionalism nor an education in an orgy of pornographic cinematic violence seem necessary in our present moment (anyone who saw the G.I. Joe movie this summer must certainly agree). Nor does it seem like the story of the Holocaust need credulous deconstruction…unless you’re a Holocaust-denying anti-semite, which Tarantino (one assumes) is not. So the motivation for the movie is a bit of a puzzle. One imagines Tarantino at the end of the film looking it over and saying to himself either, “I’m a genius, and this is my masterpiece” or “Boy, if anyone actually buys this crap they are such suckers.” One can possibly imagine him saying both simultaneously.

I know, this could be said to be a criticism of the whole Tarantino/Rodriguez nihilistic oeuvre, with its fascination of form over morality and its love of carnage. There is indeed much to be admired here in Tarantino’s facility with writing and directing, and Inglourious Basterds seems to have elevated this sort of thing to a true art, as much as that word can be applied to a formalistic exercise. Yet I fear that Tarantino may have created a masterpiece that has no moral value, other than to exhibit the filmmaker’s fluency with film. In this sense, then, Eli Roth is right: this is a kind of Kosher Porn, though it’s not quite clear who’s supposed to be getting screwed.

About Me

Martin Schecter, author of cincritic.com, is a former movie critic for the Arizona Wildcat and book reviewer for the Philadelphia Inquirer. He attended the NYU Cinema Studies program and has an MFA from the University of Arizona. He is also the former Executive Producer of the movie-review website, On2Movies.